So Much Easier
by Rayn12
Summary: Annie's native charm makes things tough on the men in her life - Ben, Auggie, Jai. Spoilers through episode 8.  I own nothing.  All the dialog in this piece is lifted straight from Episode 8, whose writers get the credit for it.
1. Chapter 1

This would be so much easier if he didn't like her. Love her still, if he was being honest, but this wasn't the time for that. This was a professional meeting, and he had to keep it that way, whether or not her scent in the room made his heart beat faster, whether or not the bracelet hung beside her bed. The look on her face the night he'd shot Stas had told him she still loved him. He was here to use that, not give in to it.

No matter how much he wanted to.

"I'm not sure whether I apologize first for leaving you in Sri Lanka or for breaking into your home."

She took no pity on him. "Sri Lanka," she murmured, the hurt that he hadn't been masochistic enough to face two years ago clear and soft as she looked at him. Honesty, then. He could comfort her a little before he laid down his trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow.

"Leaving you was the hardest thing I ever had to do."

"Had to?" she challenged.

Of course she didn't understand; how could she? He'd never been able to tell her, and sure as hell no one else would. He placed the matchbook carefully, weighing his next words, balancing truth and discretion. "You changed... things for me, Annie." _Everything. You changed everything for me._

"And you left me. I was in love with you, and you skipped out with a note."

"If I would have stayed any longer you would have been in danger." A poor excuse then, when he'd lied to her from the beginning, but a good one now that she was lying, too. He felt a thrill of excitement that they were nearly on the same page, glimpsed a fleeting fancy of what they could do, hand-in-hand, now that she'd been inducted...

"From what?"

"My mission. I was with the agency." There was a joy in finally justifying his decision to slink away like a thief in the night. It wasn't his fault that their paradise came to an end. Well, not his alone...

"I knew it." She stepped in, her whisper running like fingertips along his skin. "With Stas on the train tracks – it was you who saved me."

He stifled the urge to touch her, to tell her that as long as he was alive she would have a guardian angel with an arsenal. Tonight was about a job. "I was tracking him," he admitted. A nice segue into the mission at hand. "I'm on my own now."

"And somehow that's my responsibility?"

She sounded annoyed, which annoyed him. "I was in love with you, Annie." _I gave up everything to become the kind of man you wouldn't despise, knowing that you'd never even know I did it. That love changed me forever... _

He couldn't tell her that those few weeks in Sri Lanka were the lynchpin on which all his sins and his redemption hung. She wouldn't believe him. She had a right to her anger and her suspicions. He watched her perfect lips as she chastised him, letting reality settle back in. She wasn't a partner or a girlfriend, she was an asset, and he was here to flip her.

"Why are you here? Now."

Straight and to the point, the way Annie liked things. "The Cole painting at the auction."

"You marked it on my program," she realized.

"There's more there. Keep digging. Just... push it hard."

He felt the mistake even before her face fell. Ben Mercer was a gifted handler, cynical as he may be about the talent now. He told himself that he wasn't distracted by the memory of her breath on his neck, that he'd just misjudged her resentment and the depth of the residue of trust between them. He'd come here prepared to tell her more if he had to, knowing he'd probably have to. She was not a woman to take only what she was given.

"There's an arms dealer," he said, and she stopped walking away. "Seref Murat. The auction is one of the ways he moves his money."

He could see the dogged intellect the agency must love kindling in her eyes. "That's why that guy overbid so much."

"Murat's number two, Russ Hilburn. He wasn't just buying a Thomas Cole painting. He was buying a Cole and schematics for a Russian missile-guidance system."

"That doesn't make sense," she protested, turning to face him fully again. "The CIA would want to stop that. Why would-"

"They want to control it," he interrupted vehemently, a decade of anger and guilt spilling hot into the words. "They want to control _him_. _I_ want to _stop_ Murat."

"So, just to be clear... you're not asking for forgiveness. You're asking me for a favor."

Forgiveness? She said it like it was something she might actually grant, as if it were somehow possible for them to... to what? Make up? Be friends? Ever speak to each other again without endangering each other's lives? Could this have gone differently if he'd come to her as a man, a man who'd spent the last ten years getting closer to the edge, his back against the wall...? He stared at her, the words jamming in his throat.

"What do you want me to do?" she sighed.

He could drink to might-have-beens later. "Go to Sophie Jacklin, the Bramble's director. Ask her about February twenty second, lots nineteen and seventy five. It may take some coaxing but I think she'll come into Langley with you. And if you have to use my name, you use it." That should get them both to safety and the information where it needed to be.

"You _know_ her?"

"Call her Mona Lisa and she'll know you're not bluffing."

Betrayal, all over again – he could see it in her eyes. Not only wasn't he here to apologize, he'd come for another woman. So be it. He owed Sophie, and needed her, too, to put Murat out of business. This was the deal he'd made the night he left Annie sleeping on the beach. It was way too late to back out now.

She shook her head, a blanket denial. "No."

"Annie, I know this is a lot to take in-"

"The CIA-"

The naivete that had been so charming in a seasoned traveler would get her killed as an agent. "Forget protocol." Anger sharpened his voice again, all the things he wanted to say to his 'superiors' bubbling on his tongue. Annie was not a pawn for their games. "The agency is using _you_ to get to _me_. You can't believe anything they say about me or anything I've done. Do _not_ _trust_ Joan and Arthur."

Too far; he'd misjudged the step again, spoken the truth when he should have played it cool. When he'd practiced this in his head he'd been more convincing, more rational. Of course, he hadn't had her dark eyes staring at him then.

He grabbed her arm before she could stalk away, forcing her to meet his gaze. Truth and emotion were what he had, so he would work with them. "Maybe I don't deserve this. But I'm asking you to trust me. Trust the man you fell in love with in Sri Lanka."

For a moment he was afraid she wouldn't be able to; it hurt more than he expected. But then she was looking at him with an expression he'd last seen with the Indian Ocean crashing in his ears, her face inches from his, and it wasn't the op he was thinking about any more.

_What else might she forgive?_


	2. Chapter 2

This would be so much easier if he didn't like her. He could just do his job, in and out, without worrying about the consequences of what he might find and without concern for who might be hovering over his shoulder, metaphorically or otherwise. Without counting all the reasons he should have known something was wrong, and all the times he should have stepped in, either to stop it or to make sure she committed her treason _correctly_, dammit. Annie was smart, but she was new and much greener than she realized. At the rate she was going, she wouldn't have the chance to learn from her mistakes.

The computer was cleaner than it ought to be, but not clean enough to hold him for long. He toyed briefly with the idea of drawing the process out, stalling to give Annie time to work through whatever it was she was doing all by herself, and decided against it. The faster he knew what it was Annie was playing with, the better equipped he'd be to help her. Of course, if she'd just talked to him in the _first_ place...

_What? She wouldn't be sitting in a federal holding cell, about to be charged with four murders? Impossible to say without more information. Get back to work, Anderson._

_ Don't wonder if she crossed a line and will be hung out to dry for it. Don't think about who might be looking for her while she stays a sitting duck in a cell. Joan would have mentioned it if she were hurt or in danger. Don't..._

_ Back to work._

Auggie knew the cost of the work they did, better than most. People got hurt, people died. So did friendships, families, and careers. This stunt could carry any of those consequences for Annie – how would she ever explain four murder convictions to her sister? And they would be convictions; someone had to take the fall for this. What was it that was worth this much to her? Why on earth, after all that they had been through together since she left the farm, did she feel the need to lie to him?

And what did Jai know that he wasn't sharing?

Too many questions – it was time for some answers. He could use Annie's misstep to do a little digging of his own, begining with one Ben Mercer. He had a good start with the classified documents right at his fingertips, in Annie's browsing history, and his clearance was higher than hers.

_Because nothing goes with one felony like another._

Auggie normally wasn't the type to keep score, but she was gonna owe him for this one, whether he could help bail her out of it or not. Anything that worked up a camaraderie with Jai Wilcox qualified as above and beyond. Jai, though, seemed to be the one other person truly worried for Annie. Not open, but on her side, and Auggie had to give him points for that. Joan might be as well, but it was hard to tell: loyalty was important to her, but that might not work in Annie's favor this time, and since her promotion Joan kept to herself. Which left Auggie talking to Jai. Worrying together was marginally better than worrying alone.

Annie's head-first style was going to make them brothers before the year was out. Auggie sighed and resumed his efforts, trying not to think dismal thoughts as he waited for word or a breath of grapefruit perfume.


	3. Chapter 3

This would be so much easier if he didn't like her. Was this how it started with Henry? Were the first erosions of character small, the addition of an ulterior motive gently turning all your true feelings into a lie?

Because he did like her- liked her smile, her strength, her honor... hell, even liked her family. He would have been genuinely devastated to be fishing her corpse out of the harbor, was honestly elated by the look on her face when he came to her rescue (a look he flattered himself would not have been granted to just any suit with a gun and good timing). And it all felt like a lie, every last bit of it, because Arthur wanted him to run her. Someday she would find out about that, and every moment of their acquaintance would become retroactively tainted; she would despise him. And so he smiled and tried to get close without getting close, to respect her disgust for him while she flirted, to follow orders where he might have had a personal life... this _must_ be how it started. It was almost enough to make him feel sympathy for his father.

Which, of course, meant he was headed in the wrong direction. He intended to be the man his father should have been, not the man he became. Doing that meant toeing the line in the agency, but it also meant not getting sucked in. There were no distinguishing lines anymore for his father, no separation between Henry Wilcox, husband and father, and Henry Wilcox, CIA. As far as Jai remembered there never had been. The redemption of the family honor, of Jai's personal inheritance, demanded integrity in the inner circle. Compromises and betrayals were Henry's modus operandi, not Jai's. Not for the people closest to him.

So where did Annie sit? If she was only an asset, bait for the dangerous rogue Ben Mercer (who truly needed to be caught and controlled, there was no doubt about that), then he wasn't doing anything wrong. But the guilt in his gut said otherwise. She was a coworker who trusted him, a woman who'd invited him home to meet her family. A friend of sorts, one of the few who didn't seem to hold his father against him. It was a mistake to dismiss her as merely bait. As 'merely' anything.

Besides, the real question lay deeper than that. If he was not to be his father, he had to decide now where he drew the line, and how deep in the sand he drew it.

He wasn't committed yet; he didn't have to betray her. She was in danger as long as she trusted Mercer. He might be able to tell her the truth and do his job at the same time. Arthur wouldn't like it, but Arthur wasn't the man Jai wanted to be either. Annie was proving to be a powerful force in her own right. She would be of much more use if she were brought out of the dark, made an active part of the Mercer operation. If he could make her believe him. Telling her was dangerous, but the thought of it satisfied the uneasiness that had been building for so many weeks. And he had a feeling it would raise his status with Auggie, another underrated power at the agency. Loyalty to the old regime, or to those among the rising generation who were actually earning his respect? Put that way, it wasn't even a question.

If only he could tell her without committing treason.

The oath of service he'd taken, among about a thousand other commands and injunctions, forbade disclosure of the kind he was considering. He'd given his word, planning on keeping it. Arthur wouldn't be as lenient with him as Joan was with Annie, of that he could be sure. And perjure himself to save his integrity? What kind of a choice was that?

It was something to think about.


End file.
